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Interesting quote from a Sunfell post on Daily Kos that I picked up via Jesus Politics, a good blog that I just discovered which seems to be collecting lots of stufff about religion and American politics/culture:

Rev. Rod Parsley, a pastor of the World Harvest megachurch in Ohio…declared, “We’re not Democrats. We’re not Republicans. We’re Christocrats!”

“Christocrats”. Straight out of the preacher’s mouth. That might also lead to another term that seems to be percolating under the surface of the metasphere: the idea-meme of the corporate-religious complex- that synergistic, and potentially fatal (to our country) blend of Gilded Age corporate greed and hard right religious fervor. The corporate-religious complex has replaced the military-industrial complex as the driving force behind our government. If we plan to keep our country, this complex must be derailed, the synergy spoiled and the perpetrators sent off chasing their own tails.

Shorting the corporations to ground will take some brave lawmaking, and a lot of time- one giant at a time. They have to return to being responsible citizens. Doing the same to the Christocrats will require a lot of deep study of what makes them tick. Someone mentioned the ‘flock mentality’. That needs to be understood, but the followers are not sheep, or stupid. But they are intellectually lazy, since they accept the pap fed to them by their leaders. We must understand that they have a monstrous persecution complex and a deeply held belief that they/we are living in the “End Times” and that the Bible- particularly “Revalation”, is literally true. We must also understand that their leaders have fed them gigantic lies and are the embodiment of the ‘wolves in sheeps clothing’ warned about in the very Scriptures they believe are literally true.

It’s a tough nut to crack, but it is crackable. They’re human beings, with a huge cross-shaped chip on their shoulder. If that wood could be used for something useful, to build a bridge, perhaps, we could find a way to talk them down from their Apocalyptic treehouse.

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4 thoughts on “The corporate-religious-complex”

Kos makes some excellent points about the necessity for formulating a coherent strategy to combat the Christocratic menace. It seems to me there are at least two major possible paths to follow, each of which offers both unique advantages and disadvantages.

The first and most immediately obvious approach (as Kos rather tangentially suggests) would be to thoroughly discredit the leadership of the religious right by ruthlessly exposing them – out of their own Book and in the name of the very God they claim to represent – as precisely the same kinds of hypocrites and false shepherds Jesus of Nazareth (and his earlier fellow-prophets) exposed and condemned in Israel during their own times. The Bible (both Old and New) is rich with source materials for achieving this purpose – far outweighing the few paltry apocalyptic and homophobic passages so beloved of the religious right: the only possible scripturally-true Christian mission is to relieve the poor and the oppressed of this world, not to further aggrandize the wealth and power of the already wealthy and powerful, not to cheerlead at predatory imperial wars for the control of natural resources – and certainly not to expend one’s entire spiritual cannon judgmentally moralizing about the (supposed) sexual depravities of one’s neighbors. One major disadvantage of this approach is simply … the abruptly truncated life-spans most genuine prophets of God have historically enjoyed.

The second – and intellectually perhaps more attractive and practical – approach would be simply to pick up the ball where Friedrich Engels left it, when he said: “This much is certain: the only service that can still be rendered to God today is to make atheism a compulsory dogma and to surpass Bismarck’s anticlerical Kulturkampf laws by prohibiting religion in general.” [“Programme of the Blanquist Commune Immigrants.” (1874). Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Selected Works. Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1973, Vol. II, p.384.] Advantages of the Marxist-Leninist approach include: explicit and uncompromising endorsement of the scientific method as the ultimate yardstick of reality; an unrelentingly practical approach to the real-life problems of real-life human beings in the here-and-now: food, clothing, shelter, medical care, infrastructure and education; a coherent and practical plan for establishing world government (as Lenin called it, “A United States of the World” [“On the Slogan for a United States of Europe.” (1915). V. I. Lenin. Selected Works. Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1975, vol. I, p.664.]), which would immediately free over a trillion dollars in capital annually from the planet’s defense budgets for international development and – not incidentally – also immediately remove the Damoclean sword of nuclear annihilation from over the collective human head. The myriad perceived disadvantages of this course are mainly anecdotal and in most cases blatently ad hominem attacks against conveniently dead straw-men. Philosophical arguments against the idea of world government can be shown in every case to be, at root, anarchist arguments against all government on principle, and may easily be refuted simply by reference to various sections of the Federalist Papers of Hamilton, Madison and Jay (leaving Marx, Engels and Lenin entirely to the side for the time being, if one so desires).

The two suggested approaches are in no sense mutually exclusive and should, in fact, be mingled to one or another degree until the proper mixture is found. A politically-charged true Christian mission against poverty, ignorance, greed and oppression worldwide; in concert with spiritually-aware and scripturally-informed atheist cadres committed to the same ends; joined by advanced and thoughtful Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Jews, and Animists worldwide, who hear the same call to compassion and universal love in their own beliefs and traditions; all struggling together to transcend and master the immature, stunted and dangerous institutions of sectarianism, blind superstition, racism and jingo-nationalism everywhere: could be the future of the world. Or there might be something left to build upon in the ashes of the Armageddon, otherwise; who knows?

I always think I’m going to just write a quick paragraph, everytime something on this blog inspires me to comment. And I always end up spouting off at length and getting further and further entangled in the spider’s web. Hope I’m not just distracting you from the herculean task of whittling this enormous phenomenon down into a coherent thesis. It’s a monster – on many different levels…

A possibly not-uninteresting article from the Metro pages of today’s Washington Post. For those not particularly attracted to the idea of registering with the Post to obtain the “privilege” of reading their articles, I reproduce the text in full, after the

The last guitar licks faded out, the screen went blank and students sat quietly in the dark classroom. Senior Tallie Jamison walked to the front to give her final presentation. “So,” she said. “Here we are at the end.”

It was the last class of the apocalypse, and everyone was hoping it would finish with a bang.

When Professor Eduardo Velasquez offered a politics course on the apocalypse this year for the first time, he didn’t expect to have to turn away more than four-fifths of the Washington and Lee University students who wanted to take it. But the idea of the apocalypse has taken hold in strange ways in this post-millennial, post-Cold War, post-Sept. 11 world.

He sees worry about the future saturating popular culture — in song lyrics, a crop of apocalyptic movies, video games, the NBC show “Revelations” this spring and such bestselling books as the “Left Behind” series and its spinoffs, which have sold more than 63 million copies.

Advances in science and technology are changing life and death, changing the environment and making it difficult to see what is ahead, Velasquez said. “I can’t tell you about floating up someplace, or a rapture, but it does seem to me that we are at the end of something, that we are a civilization that has exhausted itself.”

Pretty heavy stuff for the last week of school, when most seniors are more interested in sitting on fraternity porches in the sun with a beer or floating on rafts down the Maury River. But then again, as students hurtle toward the abyss — graduation, moving, jobs — what better time for a class that asks what’s next?

“We’re not talking about the world blowing up,” said Michael Lee, 22, who will graduate from the small Lexington college Thursday. The literal meaning of apocalypse, they learned, is to uncover, or disclose. “We’re talking about apocalypse in terms of a revelation for humankind . . . something that will shape the world in the next century.”

As with many seniors, it’s the only class he is taking in the last weeks of school; all Washington and Lee students end the year with a six-week term that’s more intensive, and often more creative, than traditional classes. As he finishes 17 years of learning to launch into a new life, Lee said, “I can’t think of a better course to finish off with.”

He knows his immediate future: a job as a health care lobbyist in Washington. “After that, it’s a great unknown.”

In their last class, on the big screen at the front of the room, the students watched a very small and agitated chicken that was wearing glasses. “He saw the signs,” the movie trailer voice-over intoned. “He tried to warn us.”

The background music for a promo for the new Disney movie “Chicken Little” filled the room: the R.E.M. song “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine).”

They laughed, thinking about how it fit in with the philosophy. Each student has talked about apocalyptic music in class, passing out lyrics, showing videos, blasting Modest Mouse or Led Zeppelin or Tupac.

Velasquez started using popular culture in his classes after several years of trying to get students excited about political philosophy texts by such writers as Locke and Hobbes and Plato, to no avail. Frustrated, he decided he could meet them halfway. Besides, he figured, pop culture isn’t going away. “This is the atmosphere,” he said. “This is what we breathe.”

Some of his colleagues have criticized the approach as dumbing down the curriculum. But he hopes he is reaching students more directly, weaving the classic philosophers in, and teaching them to think more critically. In class the other day, he cautioned students against reading too much into songs, but he thinks people in general are much more prone to under-think than to over-think.

Most of the classes are discussions, not lectures. There are long silences while students think about what has been said or struggle to answer a question. Along the way, he has created a closeness that fosters both risks and revelations.

Some of the idea for the class came from students, who often give him music or DVDs. He was surprised that the same themes kept coming up, especially the sense of uncertainty about the future.

Velasquez thought that he might write a book called “A New Genesis” — until it hit him that he has no idea what is ahead.

Now his working title is “A Student’s Guide to the Apocalypse.”

So for the past six weeks, his students have been thinking about the end of the world as we know it. Senior Jackson Mabry did his project on Johnny Cash, someone he had never thought of as apocalyptic until he listened more closely to the song about Folsom prison. “That’s the end of the world,” Mabry said. “All this hellfire and brimstone raining down on you. The only hope is in something unseen, and in the song he hears the whistle of the train, and he’s able to conjure up images of hope and the good life.”

For his final project, Lee is exploring the idea of self, and whether advances in scientific knowledge will wipe out the understanding of the soul. He’s creating a Web site that mixes Tom Wolfe’s college-life novel “I Am Charlotte Simmons” with neuroscience and Nietzsche. In their last class, they watched R.E.M. sing through a newscast of natural disasters, talked about how every earthquake and flood and car bomb is now broadcast instantaneously to everyone, how that can bring a sense of constant calamity and threat — and how the band has said that change is essential.

Jamison stood up for her presentation:

“The end of the world for me,” she said, “is graduation. That’s what it is for most of us. It’s really scary. It’s coming. The clock is ticking. But we don’t really know what comes after that.”

She took a deep breath, then began her own revelations. She read from her sophomore-year journal to show how she had changed, showed the numbers she used to tabulate every time she ate, counting calories to measure her self-worth.

When she paused, after describing a car wreck, exhaustion from exams, fear, loneliness, self-destruction, the class was silent. Minutes went by.

She turned off the lights and turned up the music, letting Coldplay’s “Everything’s Not Lost” ripple through the darkness.

“That was my own apocalypse,” she said.

When Velasquez stood up and turned on the lights, everyone was still quiet.

He said a few halting words, pausing to sip a bottle of water. He was thinking about what she was leaving behind, and what she had ahead. And what they all have ahead. He’s going away, too, moving his family to Denmark for a year to teach there. Change is good, he said. It’s hard, but it’s good. He looked at his class again, students who had taken course after course from him, and then walked over to the classroom door and opened it, and smiled at them.

As an addendum to my post immediately above, I note for the information of the uninitiated, that Washington and Lee University ( http://www.wlu.edu/ ), founded in 1749, is located in the little town of Lexington, ( http://www.lexingtonvirginia.com/ ), population 7000, smack-dab in the center of the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Both much-fabled Confederate war heroes – General Robert E. Lee (president of W&L after the Civil War) and General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson – are buried in this town; and the world-renowned Virginia Military Institute ( http://www.vmi.edu/ ) – 257 of whose cadets are still celebrated as having provided the margin of Confederate victory at the Battle of New Market in 1864 – is also located here.

This is all just a little socio-cultural place-setting, as no more hagiographically “Southern,” i.e. “Confederate,” location in these United States is likely to be found. In addition, Lynchburg, Virginia – the fundamentalist Baptist preacher Jerry Falwell’s center of operations ( http://www.falwell.com/ ) – is approximately 30 miles SE of Lexington.

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We all live in a number of possible worlds…. This is my attempt to bring together different strands of my life into one cyber environment. You’ll find thoughts, research, and resources on media & journalism (I’ve been a journalist for the last twenty years) teaching & learning (I’m a teaching and learning leader) web-tech & blogging (I’m a middle aged, aspiring geek) myth, narrative & the apocalyptic (my PhD topic) some photography (I’m an exhibiting artist) and as the lotus logo portends the occasional koanic insight (I’m a one-time Catholic longtime aspiring Zen Buddhist).